The field of the invention is telecommunications networks that enable terminals to access multimedia services.
The invention relates more particularly to multimedia services offered to terminals connected to a network via an access point or gateway.
The invention thus finds one particularly beneficial but non-limiting application to offering a multimedia service to a terminal connected to a home gateway in a home network or to a roaming terminal connected to the Internet via a wireless access point (Hot Spot).
In the context of the present invention, the term multimedia is to be understood in a broad sense, a multimedia service being in particular a service providing access to multimedia documents (images, videos, digital audio files, messaging services and, more generally, any service requiring a transfer of digital data between terminals (web server access, file transfer, etc.).
In the current state of the art, communication of digital data between two terminals on different local area networks requires various parameters of the terminals to be set in order to be able to set up a call, which can be a complicated process, especially for non-expert users.
For example, to transfer files between two computers connected to different local area networks, it is necessary to configure each of the computers with the FTP (File Transport Protocol) address and the password of the remote computer.
If the users of the computers then wish to set up a connection between another two of their terminals, for example to download a video stream from a video server of the first user to the set-top box of the user of the other network, it is necessary to configure each of the terminals independently, the configuration of the first computers being such that it is not possible to avoid this task.